FPS Drops (Foreground)

Hi,

I’m having a peculiar issue: in any gpu-taxing environment, my game will drop from ~80+ FPS to ~1 FPS. This persists for a long time or until I switch monitors, at which point the game will comfortably run at whatever my background FPS cap shows (e.g., 30 FPS). That is, it runs distinctly higher in background during these stutters than in foreground.

During these stutters, my “3D” in task manager drops to super low levels and my “copy” in the GPU tab spikes at the beginning of the stutters. All other performance indicators (wifi, CPU, RAM, HDD, etc.) all seem normal. Any help would be appreciated – the game is hard to play when I need to alt-tab to restore gameplay every time.

Troubleshooting requires a DxDiag, please paste one in a reply here.

Thanks for prompting, DxDiag output here: https://pastebin.com/h9kDwt9N

You seem to be having graphics driver crashes and issues with the Alienware command center.

You can remove the Alienware to test, and do an Uninstall and clean reinstall of the graphics drivers using ddu.

For posterity, it seems the issue was NVidia instant replay. List of things I tried/failed below for those with similar issues. I’ve had problems with the NVidia IR before – not sure if my driver update turned it back on or if I had done so recently for some reason, but this made the game unplayable.

Additional info:

  • Disabled Discord overlay, Xbox Game Bar, Alienware Command Center, etc.
  • Disabled all addons, turned off vertical sync, tweaked various graphics settings
  • Updated various drivers + windows + WoW

Also, when this happened on the main monitor (drop to ~1FPS), the second monitor also seems to operate at 1FPS for all applications, though my cursor will be smooth across monitors. As soon as I click to alternate monitor, it’s fine. Other threads had hypotheses that it had to do with some sort of overlay given this, which seemed like a good lead.

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